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Automated Manufacturing for 3-D PrintersDrawing on artificial-intelligence capabilities, PARC researchers are developing software meant to help make manufacturing accessible to people without manufacturing expertise.31 October 2013 | MIT Technology Review by Mike Orcutt

"In theory, 3-D printing gives consumers the ability to conceive of and make various products. But designing many objects requires specialized knowledge of geometry, materials, and manufacturing processes. Researchers at PARC are now building software tools meant to automate that kind of judgment. The goal, says PARC CEO Stephen Hoover, is to build programs that enable non-experts to “kind of think their way through a design space” before sending any instructions to the printer.

Participants in a growing online community of enthusiasts have already uploaded hundreds of thousands of designs for 3-D-printed objects. The problem is that in conventional production settings, manufacturing engineers who are well versed in the design constraints imposed by specific materials and manufacturing methods “eliminate a whole set of choices at the beginning because they know what can cause problems down the road,” says Hoover (see “The Difference Between Makers and Manufacturers”). That doesn’t necessarily happen in the world of 3-D printing."

I would sit in the storied memorabilia-laden Room 2306 in the bowels of PARC, the former Xerox research and development center in Palo Alto that gave us the 'ball' mouse, the Ethernet, and the graphical user-interface that inspired the Apple Macintosh. And seven of PARC's resident geniuses would drop by and in 15-minute bursts blow my mind with the technical wizardry each was working on to someday transform our lives."

It’s a future coming sooner than people think, said Peter Weijmarshausen, the CEO of 3-D printing start-up Shapeways. Fresh off $6.2 million in new funding for Shapeways, Weijmarshausen spoke with GigaOM about where 3-D printing is going, how it parallels the software industry and how far the technology can take us into the future.

…Another big challenge is that there’s still a limited number of materials… But he said more of these materials are becoming available. And researchers at PARC are working on printable electronics for things like RAM, sensors and transistors. That, he said, could lead to consumers creating their own phones or MP3 players housed in cases of their own design."